Hello friends,

While a giant seismic crack has been shaking another part of the world we started our month with the somewhat less dramatic though delightful view of our beach occupied by relaxed vacationists, dog-walkers, sun-chasers, and returning spring birds. Remember a great self-propelled river ferry designed by a Rupert Alternative Education alumnus, the architect Justinas Dudėnas a few years ago? Exciting news from the Vilnius city municipality has reached us – the ferry is coming back and is here to stay! Hopefully, very soon we will enjoy drifting along Neris’ streams and eddies and maybe have a picnic (or a research trip) on the other side (it’s been a long time).

With our Alternative Education Programme now in full flight, we’re happy to have re-established the Rupert Reading Group again. The initial discussion focused on the book, Slime Dynamics by Ben Woodard. As a species emerging from these clustered ponds of ooze (and as a reading group moving onto the the next phase) we will discuss the materialist considerations of Thomas Piketty next week. We’ll also be reading a brilliant essays by a guest tutor of Rupert’s Alternative Education Programme, Joanna Warsza‘s I Can’t Work Like This. If you are in Vilnius and would like to join, give us a shout!

We are also looking forward to philosopher Laurynas Adomatis joining us next week for a three-day seminar open to our Alternative Education participants. The seminar will explore the artefacts and objects of nature.

Finally, we are delighted to invite you to our first public event of the month, the installation, Me as a Dog by our current resident Megan Plunkett. It opens Friday, 13th April at the Vilnius bar, Who Hit John. The installation consists of images Plunkett has compiled from the US site, Craigslist, which she has been visiting nearly everyday for the past year.  Plunkett has collected all the images where dogs have appeared – often obviously accidentally – next to items advertised for sale. Printed in standard ‘headshot’ format and embedded throughout the interior space of the bar, the works continue Plunkett’s interest in the material conditions of photography, here touching on issues of appropriation and photographic space.

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Enjoy the sun!

Rupert

Image: Indrė Šerpytytė, From.Between.To from the exhibition Undersong co-organised by Rupert at kim? Riga. Photographer: Ansis Starks.

In Residence

Chloe Stead

Chloe Stead (b. 1988, UK) is an English writer and critic living in Berlin. Her criticism has been published by frieze, Spike Art Quarterly, Sleek, Art + Australia and AnOther Magazine. Her fiction was featured most recently in Pfeil Magazine #8, published by Montez Press. She holds a BA from Goldsmiths University of London and an MA from the Hochschüle für Bilendene Künste Hamburg. At Rupert Chloe Stead will begin researching for her first book.

In Residence

Yan Xing

Yan Xing (b. 1986, China) is known for his interdisciplinary projects which have built a complex, compelling body of work that reflects critically on how history is manufactured today.  He has exhibited and performed at venues such as the Stedelijk Museum, Rubell Family Collection, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum among others. Latest solo exhibition opened last June at the Kunsthalle Basel. At Rupert, Yan Xing will develop a new body of work based on his ongoing research into how morals, history, and aesthetics are being manipulated by the living conditions of today’s society.